Murray Gell-Mann

Murray Gell-Mann
(1929)

American physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1969
for his work pertaining to the classification of subatomic particles
and their interactions.
Having entered Yale University at the age of 15, Gell-Mann received
his B.S. in physics in 1948 and his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in 1951. His doctoral research on subatomic particles
was influential in the later work of the Nobel laureate (1963) Eugene
P. Wigner. In 1952 Gell-Mann joined the Institute for Nuclear Studies
at the University of Chicago. The following year he introduced the concept
of "strangeness," a quantum property that accounted for previously
puzzling decay patterns of certain mesons. As defined by Gell-Mann,
strangeness is conserved when any subatomic particle interacts via the
strong force--i.e., the force that binds the components of the atomic
nucleus.

In 1961 Gell-Mann and Yuval Ne'eman, an Israeli theoretical physicist,
independently proposed a scheme for classifying previously discovered
strongly interacting particles into a simple, orderly arrangement of
families. Called the Eightfold Way (after Buddha's Eightfold Path to
Enlightenment and bliss), the scheme grouped mesons and baryons (e.g.,
protons and neutrons) into multiplets of 1, 8, 10, or 27 members on
the basis of various properties. All particles in the same multiplet
are to be thought of as variant states of the same basic particle. Gell-Mann
speculated that it should be possible to explain certain properties
of known particles in terms of even more fundamental particles, or building
blocks. He later called these basic bits of matter "quarks,"
adopting the fanciful term from James Joyce's novel Finnegans Wake.
One of the early successes of Gell-Mann's quark hypothesis was the prediction
and subsequent discovery of the omega-minus particle (1964). Over the
years, research has yielded other findings that have led to the wide
acceptance and elaboration of the quark concept (see also quark).

Gell-Mann joined the faculty of the California Institute of Technology,
Pasadena, in 1955 and was appointed Millikan professor of theoretical
physics in 1967. He published a number of works, notable among which
are The Eightfold Way (1964), written in collaboration with Ne'eman;
Broken Scale Variance and the Light Cone (1971), coauthored with K.
Wilson; and The Quark and the Jaguar (1994).